Ramblings and other miscellany.

Posts Tagged ‘vanilla’

I’ve gone through so many forum solutions over the years. I moved to bbPress at some point a while ago because I was tired of trying to integrate Vanilla with WordPress. Unfortunately, bbPress doesn’t seem to be updated often, and is seriously lacking… almost everything.

I think it’s time to move back to Vanilla (again). It integrates so much better, and even though I absolutely loved it the last time I used it, it looks so much slicker now.

I’ve been doing some tinkering, and it’s NOT going to be an easy process. There’s a script that’s supposed to help with the migration – but it fails horribly for me no matter what I do to try to coerce into behaving. I’ve mapped out a lot of the fields (maybe I should actually write all of that down and share it) and that portion isn’t so bad. It’s the differences in the way that bbPress and Vanilla each store the content of the first post of each topic that’s going to be the biggest pain. Thankfully my little forum is pretty low traffic, so I can take my time.

So far I’ve tried a LOT of different approaches, and ruled them all out. I think I have a game plan now, and just need to sit down for a day and get it done. I’m hoping it actually works and I’m not wasting my time. It’s not entirely a waste though – I consider myself a database n00b, and hacking through all of this is teaching me quite a bit.

I really don’t know what to think these days. I’ve fought to get WordPress 2.5x integrated with Vanilla forums last year, and failed horribly. Although, I thought I had succeeded a number of times – only to have it somehow breakdown without any modifications.

Eventually I gave up and went to bbPress. I forget the reasoning, but for some reason I went with the alpha version. Perhaps it integrated more readily with the new version of WordPress? It works, but there are quirks.

I should actually say, it worked. I updated bbPress, and it appeared to work ok. However, now you can’t actually open any threads. Odd. So its’ a forum where you can only login and see what is there, but not open or reply to anything? How useful. hahahaha

Now that the forum is just about completely hosed (and I haven’t figured out why yet), along with the original quirks… I’m tempted to give the WordPress+Vanilla another try. Or, I was.

Then I went back to that original thread that is apparently still active. It looks like people have been recently attempting this with the current versions with even less luck than before…?

I’ll think about it. For now I just need to get my new design up and functional – and THEN consider major hackory on my forum. But until then, the forum may be unusable

Looks like the forum’s cookies are broken on the forum again. And again, nothing has changed so I don’t know why it happened. I might start looking into migrating to bbPress again because this is just getting ridiculous.

I’ve setup a login form on the home page. I kind of hacked it together, but it works. At least it contains the links to your WordPress & Vanilla profiles, as well as the forum for now. I’ll work on cleaning it up and setting some conditions when I have time.

If you’ve googled “WordPress Vanilla integration” then I’m sure you’ve come across the instructions on the Lussumo website. Thanks to them for taking some time to write that up! Unfortunately, that is no longer sufficient because it documents integrating WordPress 2.0.4 and Vanilla 1.0.1. At the time of writing this entry, WordPress is at 2.5.1 and Vanilla is at 1.1.4. In addition, every tutorial or bit of info that I’ve found has made the assumption that everything is starting out fresh and new. That makes it almost easy as cake! However, that doesn’t entirely work for me since I already had both WordPress and Vanilla installed, with users and content – functioning independently.(more…)